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Learn moreBrought to you by Penguin.
In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook.
Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing "fake news" accounts, the handling of its users' personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation.
Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook's key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy's sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences.
© Steven Levy 2020 (P) Penguin Audio 2020
Steven Levy is Wired's editor at large. The Washington Post has called him 'America's premier technology journalist.' His previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. Levy has written seven previous books and has written for Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Levy has also won several awards during his thirty-plus years of writing about technology, including for his book Hackers, which PC Magazine named the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years; and for Crypto, which won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair.
Reviews
This absorbing book will inspire important conversations about big tech and privacy in the twenty-first century This fascinating book reveals the imperial ambitions of Facebook's founder A tour de force of access journalism Steven Levy is the founding guru of technology journalismLevy's narrative is richly detailed, thanks to interviews with Facebookers past and present...His account of Zuckerberg's abbreviated Harvard tenure and Facebook's early years feel fresh, with plenty of colour that reminds you the HBO show Silicon Valley did not have to reach far for its satire
Comprehensive and captivating history
Levy writes with verve... [he] is able to trace the origins of the Cambridge Analytica scheme to Facebook's disregard for the privacy concerns of the first users... He doesn't shy from asking the tough questions
Fresh, up-to-date and insiderishLevy portrays a tech company where no one is taking responsibility for what it has unleashed... The book closes with a recognition that Facebook is bulldozing ahead with new innovations - from Facebook dating to its Libra digital currency project - while Zuckerberg continues to shrug off any ethical queries about his past behaviour
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